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RWW: “Mark Zuckerberg, interviewed on the subject of Facebook Groups, told GigOm’s Liz Gannes ‘Yeah, well maybe this will replace Socialcast! [laughs] Not today, this isn’t designed to be an enterprise product.’ … ‘Facebook Groups actually strengthens the case for Yammer,’ says Yammer CEO David Sacks. He points out that if organizations don’t adopt their own enterprise social networking systems ‘Your employees may start using a public platform that you have no control over.‘ He encourages to organizations to formulate an internal social networking policy and set aside funds to purchase enterprise social networking software. … All enterprise SaaS solutions involve putting intellectual property on someone else’s servers, but Facebook will need an enterprise friendly TOS before this behavior is actively condoned by corporate users. … Then there’s that qualifier ‘yet’ in Zuckerberg’s statement. Someday, with tighter, more integrated access controls and an enterprise friendly TOS, Facebook might give enterprise collaboration companies something to lose sleep over.”

Rodriguez, Clearvale: “On the low-end, Facebook Groups is likely to put pressure on vendors that provide simple collaboration tools – for example, 37Signals, Ning, and Google. We’ll have to see how much pressure – some of these tools are quite popular and quite good. But on the higher end of the market – the part of the market that sells to the enterprise – the disruption is likely to be more subtle. The enterprise will require a whole lot more functionality, and more in the way of privacy and security. But Facebook Groups could help evangelize the new architectural requirements for business collaboration. It wouldn’t be the first time that Facebook taught the business community something about collaboration – think of all the Enterprise 2.0 vendors who cannot resist telling customers that they are a ‘Facebook for the enterprise’? But the new lesson from Facebook – obvious to some, but not yet clear to many – is that collaboration with people outside your company needs to be in the cloud – how else would you be able to freely connect and collaborate with them?”

Cannell, Gartner: “For me, the biggest reason Facebook is exciting (from an enterprise perspective) is because it is establishing a new widely recognizable online interaction pattern (consisting of streams of status messages and activity notifications). Enterprise collaboration products that have been providing group-focused workspaces for many years are being refitted to tap into the broad familiarity of Facebook. If they can provide something that behaves like Facebook then people will be more comfortable using it and will more easily recognize its benefits. The rebranding of enterprise wikis as enterprise social software is just one example of where this is happening. If Facebook Groups succeeds then expect enterprise products to soon follow by providing similar experiences. – Personally, I would love to see Facebook Groups succeed. Not for the sake of Facebook, but for the sake of enterprises trying to use their intranets for something like Facebook.”